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This actually did work with old PCs, where the spinning disc(s) in the hard drive could get stuck until / unless you gave 'em a good whack.
No idea if that's true on modern machines, though somehow I suspect not.

Hey, Vernon Wells robbed Omar Infante of a home run with a great catch last night. That sort of thing could even make him valuable to a team that doesn't have three other outfielders who can do that.

Heck yeah. That was one of the best plays I've seen live. What impressed me most was how easy he made it look. Then again the other great play I've seen was by Emmanuel Burriss in Randy Johnson's 300th win, and you know how useful he's turned out to be.

Whenever I call IT support at work, if the solution will take more than 5-10 minutes or they aren't sure whether it will work, I just reboot my computer instead.

I am IT by default at work (small company and I'm basically the tallest midget of the group when it comes to computers, networking, etc.)...my rule of thumb is that they have to try a reboot of at least the program that is giving them a problem before I leave my office...works often enough that I avoid giving the old dells we have more than a whack or 2 a month.

Can this be a default tech support thread? I have an HP laptop that, after running for a little while, will get totally gummed up and glacial. Task manager will show 100 percent usage even if ardly anything is running and ending applications running in the background doesn't seem to help. Thoughts?

I had a similar problem with a laptop a couple years ago. Turned out the hard disk was dying and the CPU was getting gummed up trying to cope with it by retrying over and over and over when there was an error.

I'd look into that if your HD seems to be working harder than it should be.

I am an IT professional, but I know less about the hardware than most people (designing and populating big databases full of data about YOU is what I do), but for the slow HP it sounds like either hardware failure (like Dan said) or some kind of horrible virus, worm, malware doing crap to your PC. Scan and defrag/fix your hard drive, get a good program to sweep your PC for evil crapware, remove as many unnneeded programs from the PC as you can and look for stuff that is starting up and running that you really don't need (My old HP had a whole pile of stuff installed and running everytime I booted up - none of which I needed).

If all that fails then it is time to call in someone who knows what they are doing or buy a new laptop.

when i worked IT, my default thing (which everyone knew) was "reboot!". got so people would call me and say "i've already rebooted (or cold booted).

journalist - try installing malwarebytes to check out if there's bad antiviruses on there. also, most of the antivirus/firewall programs are really bloated. i've installed comodo firewall with avast antivirus (only on each of those) and set them up on my machine, and they've been great. i googled people with that setup and found the "best" (definitely in quotes) way to set it up, and it's been fine for me. use only ONE firewall and ONE antivirus.

also, you'll want to get rid of files in your temp directory - could be under /tmp, /temp, /windows/temp or something like that. and clear out the cache from your browsers.

the program that will enable you to get rid of things running at startup is msconfig. only use it if you know what you're doing, but you generally don't need adobe acrobat, apple products (on a pc), google toolbar, etc. running.

and i'd almost bet somewhere on your machine is a browser toolbar. they generally kludge things up.

EDIT: tom - something is running, that's what the unresponsive script part means. if it happens on startup, you might be able to figure it out with msconfig (i don't recommend going in the registry to check other things). it might also be a problem with something like java; make sure those programs are up to date.

Whenever I call IT support at work, if the solution will take more than 5-10 minutes or they aren't sure whether it will work, I just reboot my computer instead.

I know more about PCs than our IT support so I usually end up telling them what to do.

The crowing achievement of our IT department was borking about 1,000 PCs by installing Microsoft Forefront on top of an already installed and running Norton Antivirus which caused all kinds of strangeness in Windows XP. They then couldn't figure out how to remove Norton Antivirus so ended up doing a full re-install on every computer.

If you're sure you don't have any hogs running in the background, you're probably looking at a hardware problem. If you're seeing high CPU usage even though you're not seeing any running processes that are demanding so much muscle -- you might just have a registry conflict, bad driver, controller, etc.... You can try digging through them via some of the tools explained here. Chances are good, though, that if you find the issue here -- and you HAVEN'T installed anything new of late -- you've still got a hardware problem and you'd just be patching/working around it. Still - you might just find a bad driver that you can rollback. I had this problem recently on my desktop - and it turned out that GeForce had released a faulty driver update. Rolling back fixed my problem.

If you're running one of the major antivirus programs - it might also be a good idea to check its history. Those bastards are famous for deploying bad code that causes such problems and what's worse, they hide processes to boot - you could try rolling back or even just temporarily disabling to see if that solves it.

Another possible solution - if you're running an older processor - you can increase the size of your cache. Most defaults are set to only about 50% capacity; you can bump the slider up to 100%.... though note, that if you do have a hardware on its way out the door - this going to hasten its demise since you're essentially expanding the available 'fast memory' and just trying to force more through an ultimately faulty door. This used to be a great trick to add more power to a single core processor machine, but it's less effective on a multicore because caching gets a bit more complex than simply adding more space.

One reason I really hate laptops is that they're so hard to swap faulty components in and out of -- on a desktop, you could just start in safe mode, iteratively isolating different pieces until you found the problem (if its hardware based), simply swap out whatever you needed to swap out. You can still try this on a laptop to at least figure out if its a cheaper part to have someone else replace or not -- technically, you don't necessarily even need to start in safe mode... just try disabling various ancillary components (network card, etc) and see if you get better performance.

My Dell laptop does the same thing: I get "Warning: Unresponsive Script" about five times a day, and it just stops doing anything for five or ten minutes.

This is a java problem. Try to update your java and internet browser(s). Alot of the time however, it's a poorly coded web page that is giving you the error.

If you use Firefox, install "no script". After about a week of using it and having it "learn" what website you want to allow scripts on, it's awesome. Never get a java based virus again and avoid all the annoying video popups out there.

I have an HP laptop that, after running for a little while, will get totally gummed up and glacial. Task manager will show 100 percent usage even if ardly anything is running and ending applications running in the background doesn't seem to help. Thoughts?

Try loading Windows into safe mode, does it seem faster? Install a program called "hd tune free". Run the full error scan, it will take about 3-4 hours. If it comes back with any "red" sectors you have a failing hd, backup immediatly and take it to your local repair shop to have them put in a new hard drive. If the test comes back clean, you're probably experiencing an virus/software/windows problem that can be hard to pin down by a non-seasoned pro.

Thanks for your suggestions guys. I really appreciate it. FWIW, this FEELS more like a virus thing to me than an HD faillure, especially because my wife and I have been known to download the occasional TOTALLY LEGAL torrent.